Finding character frequency using Python - Dictionary

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#open a file and find its character frequency with open('raw_corpus.txt') as fp: lines = fp.read().split("\n") #here lines contains entire file contents #incremental variable i=1; #dictionary to save characters as keys and values as fruquency charcount={} #to access file contents line by line for line in lines: #convert to lowercase lower_line = line.lower() chars = lower_line #for loop to access current line characters for char in chars: if char not in charcount: charcount[char] = 1 else: charcount[char] += 1 #print (i,"\t",lower_line) i = i + 1 #increment i #print the dictionary with sorted keys(tokens) and values for k in sorted(charcount): print (k, charcount[k])

This script will open the file 'raw_corpus.txt' read its contents line by line, then find each character frequency and store in dictionary.

Dictionary in Python is similar to hashes in Perl. It stores a values for each corresponding key, duplicate keys are overridden when a same key is encountered while storing.